Forty-eight hours wasn't nearly enough.
Ren spent the first of them in a daze, his mind buzzing with alien fragments—half-memories and broken phrases in dead languages. His dreams were worse: he saw cities crumbling under black suns, children made of glass screaming silently, machines weeping blood from their seams.
And always, the voice.
> "Echo Sync Initiating. Subject integrity at sixty-two percent."
He wasn't sure what that meant.
Serei tried to explain. "Your soul and the Archive's imprint are fusing. The deeper the sync, the less resistance. But if it happens too fast…"
She didn't finish the sentence.
Instead, she taught him how to slow the process—breathing patterns, grounding techniques, ways to anchor himself in his own body. But it only barely worked.
Because with every passing hour, Ren felt less like himself.
The worst moment came when he stared into a broken terminal and instinctively knew how to fix it—not from logic or memory, but from something deeper. His hands moved without conscious thought. Wires were rerouted. Energy channels adjusted. Within seconds, the console lit up.
"That's not me," he whispered.
"No," Serei said. "It's the you they designed."
---
They used the reactivated console to dig deeper into the Archive's records.
And found the truth.
The Echoborn Protocol was not a single project, but a cycle—a repeating sequence of soul-bound candidates drawn into the facility by chance or bloodline or resonance. Each one meant to inherit the memories of those before them. Each one tasked with finding a way to stop the collapse. Each one… failing.
Dozens had come before Ren. Some had made it through the sync. Most hadn't. The ones who did… changed. Some went mad. Some vanished. One tried to overwrite the entire Archive and became part of its corrupted codebase.
"What happened to them?" Ren asked.
"They became ghosts in the system," Serei said. "Memory shades. Warnings. Traps."
She showed him one: a hollow-eyed projection flickering in static, repeating the phrase "we were wrong, it was never salvation—just recursion" over and over again.
Ren backed away.
"This isn't a gift," he said. "It's a prison."
"No," Serei replied. "It's both."
---
As the final hours ticked down, the chamber housing the obelisk changed. Lights dimmed. Floors pulsed with rhythm like a heartbeat. The holographic Earth now flickered with strands of golden code—threads leading out into nothingness.
> "Echo Sync: Phase Two. Conscious harmonization required."
Ren sat beneath the obelisk, breath shallow. His shard vibrated like a tuning fork.
"You don't have to do this," Serei said.
He didn't answer immediately. His hand trembled, the weight of every choice pressing against his spine.
"I saw them," he said. "In my dream last night. All the others. The ones who failed."
"And?"
"They weren't trying to save the world. Not really. They were trying to save themselves."
"That's enough, sometimes," she said.
He nodded. "But not for me."
He placed the shard on the ground.
"I need to know what broke this world. I need to see it."
Serei stepped back.
The lights flared.
> "Echo Sync: Initiating now."
---
Ren's body froze, but his mind fell.
Fell through a tunnel of static and fire. Through memories not his own, stitched together like patchwork skin. He saw what came before: the world before the fall. A golden age of soul tech and lattice magic. Artificial gods rising from human ambition. And the decision that broke it all—a project meant to encode divinity. To bottle eternity.
> Project: Echoborn.
They tried to birth immortality through soul entanglement. But the code was imperfect. The hosts fractured. And when the servers broke, the sky broke with them.
Ren gasped as he saw the moment of collapse: Skyfire. A cascade of soul-energy erupting through every living being. Minds burned out. Cities blinked into light and vanished. Only fragments remained—buried deep beneath the earth, hidden behind protocols like the one now consuming him.
His vision twisted. He saw himself standing in that moment—unaged, in a white coat, watching the world burn. He didn't know if it was real or metaphor. Didn't matter.
He screamed as the code carved itself into his bones.
> "Subject identity stabilized. Host integrity: 78%. Sync complete."
---
He woke up to a silence so heavy it felt sacred.
Serei stood above him, her eyes wide.
"You're different," she said.
Ren sat up slowly. He felt… clear. Whole. Like static had been burned from the inside of his skull.
"I remember things," he said. "Not mine. But real."
He looked toward the center of the room. The obelisk was changing—becoming something else. Folding inward, revealing a deep, silver chamber.
A doorway.
"It's opening," Serei said. "That means you passed."
"What's in there?"
"Answers. Or the next mistake."
---
They stood together at the threshold, the echo of ancient choices whispering behind the walls.
Ren glanced at her.
"Will you come with me?"
Serei paused, then nodded. "I've come this far."
They stepped through the door as one.
And the Protocol watched.